Gray: Lockup in the sky with diamonds

Lockup in the sky with diamonds

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, July 5, 2009

Photo: MAYRA BELTRÁN, Chronicle

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Jeff Reese used to smuggle canvases into his job at the Harris County Jail and paint while he guarded prisoners. The results, which he signs “Solomon Kane,” are psychedelic, groovy paintings you’d have seen under black lights during the Sgt. Pepper era. ﻿ less

Jeff Reese used to smuggle canvases into his job at the Harris County Jail and paint while he guarded prisoners. The results, which he signs “Solomon Kane,” are psychedelic, groovy paintings ... more

Photo: MAYRA BELTRÁN, Chronicle

Gray: Lockup in the sky with diamonds

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“Want to see the paintings under black lights?” Jeff Reese asked. Fifty years old, he was somehow all puppyish enthusiasm.

We were in his Winter Street art studio, surrounded by his trippy work, which he exhibits under the nom de artSolomon Kane (a salute both to Soren Kierkegaard and to old pulp fiction). The paintings — most on canvas, some on odder things, like footballs or mannequins — looked like relics from the Sgt. Pepper era. In eye-popping colors, Reese had painted flowers and Stars of David, Greek letters, lightning, stars, lions, disembodied eyes and other groovy iconography. There was even a yellow submarine.

Yes, please, I said. Bring on the black lights! Reese clicked the switches, and sure enough, bits of the paintings glowed. “We should put on some Pink Floyd,” he joked.

I laughed: “These look like a drug experience.”

We’d been talking about religion and mental illness, the things that inspire Reese’s art. He grinned, his teeth glowing dimly under the lights. But suddenly, his voice was serious. “It’s all connected,” he said. “Everything is connected.”

‘Is that God?’

For Reese, maybe, everything is connected. His day job is as far from the art world as it’s possible to be. For the last 17 years, he’s worked for the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.

“I had delusions of grandeur,” he explains. “I thought I was going to fight crimes and save lives.” He shrugs. “I was naive.”

For most of that time, he’s worked at the Harris County Jail, often in the psych unit. From his teens, he felt unusually comfortable around the mentally ill. He was somehow always the guy called when an acquaintance barricaded himself in a house, or when a co-worker was threatening to stab herself with a butcher knife. While working his way through commercial-art school, Reese even shared an apartment with a sweet man who believed that the CIA had planted radios inside his head.

He was trained as a hostage negotiator. Once he talked down a man who’d doused himself with gasoline. Another time, he climbed the radio tower atop a seven-story building to convince a half-naked man to stop throwing bricks at cars on the street.

But usually, he worked inside the jail. At the psych unit, Reese often found himself talking to people who heard voices inside their heads. Sometimes they’d ask him, “Is that God?”

Reese takes God seriously. He’s been, at various times, a Methodist, a Pentecostal Christian and a Jew. He spent a year in Jerusalem, living on a kibbutz, searching for spiritual roots. He’s studied philosophy and Buddhism.

“I don’t know,” Reese would reply. “What does the voice say?”

If the voice commanded, “Eat excrement,” then Reese would say no. That voice wasn’t God.

Painting in the psych ward

Reese had stopped painting when he took the jail job, but in the mid-’90s, he felt the pull again. He started sneaking canvases and supplies into the psych unit.

How could you paint in the psych unit? I asked. Regular jail is noisy, smelly and chaotic enough. Wouldn’t the psych unit be even wilder?

But Reese says that actually, his painting worked out fine. He always got along with psych prisoners, he says, noting that in his entire career no one has ever thrown human waste at him. Probably, he says, that’s because he treats the inmates with some dignity, and stays calm when someone calls him names.

“The further along I go,” he says, “the broader the spectrum of what I consider normal.”

A lot of guarding the psych prisoners meant waiting for something to happen, and while waiting, he painted — a routine that lasted for years. One of Reese’s largest works,Ego, is 7 feet long, composed of six small panels that he painted at the jail one by one.

But awhile back, Reese says, a supervisor busted him for painting while on the clock, and he was transferred. Now, in the major offenders unit, he spends his day guarding accused killers and rapists. He paints after work at his studio.

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His subject matter, though, remains the same: the metaphysical stuff beyond the bounds of normal human perception. The extreme experiences hinted at in both insanity and religious experience. The stuff that is either a higher truth or not true at all. The stuff that glows under black lights.